Alexandra Avakianwas born in 1960 in New York, USA and began her photographic career in 1984. She has since traveled extensively, living in Moscow for two years (1990-1992), where she covered the unraveling of the Soviet Union for Time, and two years in the Gaza strip (1993-1995), documenting daily life. She also covered the uprising in Haiti in 1986; the Palestinian intifada from 1987 to 1995; the Armenian earthquake in 1988; the fall of the Berlin Wall, Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution” and the funeral of Ayatollah Khomenei in 1989; and civil war and famine in Somalia and Sudan — where she spent six months in 1992-1993.

A regular contributor to the National Geographic, for which she produced in-depth essays on Romania, Armenia, reform in Iran, and Muslims in America, among others, her work has also been published in The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Life, and Natural History in the US, Stern and GEO in Germany, Paris-Match and Libération in France, The London Sunday Times Magazine and The Independent Magazine in the UK, and many others. Focal Point, an imprint of National Geographic Books, published Avakian's decades-long project on Muslim life across the globe in a book entitled "Windows of the Soul: My Journeys in the Muslim World," (2008). She joined Contact Press Images in 1991. She is based in Washington, D.C..